what it was they were doing, but then it hit me: they were the delcator
beetles that Bernibus had told me of earlier, the ones that absorbed the
radioactive material and stabilized it. As I learned later, they had two
good uses, one was that they consumed the unstable materials and
neutralized them, but the other was that their droppings, when mixed
into the water supply, also gave all that consumed them a greater
tolerance for nuclear material. It was almost ironic that their whole
way of life was dependent on the feces of another life form, but I will
refrain from turning it into a metaphor.

The female Zards wore a black headpiece that mostly covered their faces,
and at first I found it strange that for all his talk of progress, the
King's people still oppressed their women, perhaps there wasn't as much
progress as he had boasted, or, more likely, he was unaware that there
was no such thing as progress, just different manifestations of
oppression. History repeats itself, they say, and indeed it does, both
literally and figuratively.

There suddenly arose a great commotion in the square between the Temple
and the palace, and as I looked, I was surprised to see that there was a
large crowd gathered. In the middle of the square there were two groups
of ten Zards facing each other, with a single Zard in between them, and
around the outside of the plaza area stood a hundred or so spectators,
apparently watching those in the middle. A moment after I started
watching, the solitary Zard, the referee as I found out, walked to the
edge, and each of the groups walked to one of the opposing sides and
then turned about to face the other. The referee let out a loud yell and
in a flash, the two teams ran at each other headlong, until converging
somewhere in the center of the field. As they met they dived upon one
another and pushed and shoved until the left team had isolated one of